President Cyril Ramaphosa and Eskom haven’t found a silver bullet to ease load shedding in South Africa, despite canceling their trip to Davos and holding emergency meetings all week.
It appears that these emergency meetings failed to come up with any new quick-fix solutions to load shedding this week, instead relying on past long-term plans to boost grid capacity.
Meeting attendees said that the president’s plan was only useful now if it had been announced three years ago. There are three phases to the new plan – which is the old plan:
- Maintain coal-fired power plants urgently
- Develop new capabilities
- Regulations should be removed
Providing Eskom with more diesel for its open-cycle gas turbines and fighting criminal syndicates that are causing, if not directly exacerbating, the energy crisis are the only things that can be done in the short term.
Ramaphosa previously announced a plan to tackle load shedding during his State of the Nation address in 2022 which reflected this in slightly more detail. Aspects of the plan have already been implemented, while others have taken longer than expected.
Fundamentally, however, the plan to end load shedding is a long-term one, with many points – like building new generation capacity – needing time to become reality.
There are also aspects of the plan, such as bid windows five and six of the renewable energy programme, which have already failed.
The National Energy Crisis Committee (Necom), a body run by Ramaphosa’s office, this week announced an emergency plan to try and tackle load shedding in the short term – but even this is rooted in the long-term plan, and will still require at least a year to come into effect.
Other aspects of the plan, like introducing new laws to speed up the development of power plants, are also vague and will need time to process.
The measures that Necom said may ease the crisis include:
- The first of more than 100 privately owned power plants being developed will connect to the grid by the end of this year. In total, the planned projects could produce 9,000 megawatts, much of it for the companies’ own use.
- Emergency legislation is being developed to allow the faster approval and development of power plants.
- Contracts for the construction of plants that will produce 2,800 megawatts of renewable energy for the grid have been signed and construction will soon begin.
- As much as 1,000 megawatts may be imported this year from neighbouring countries, and Eskom will buy 1,000 megawatts of excess energy from private producers who already have facilities.
- Six of Eskom’s 14 coal-fired power plants have been “identified for particular focus” in a bid to get them to perform more reliably.
- Efforts to finish incomplete plants and maintenance of other major units are being made.
- The time to complete regulatory processes for new plants has been reduced.
Analysts and economists said that there isn’t really anything immediate that can be done about the energy crisis without causing damage to the ANC, and it was clear that Ramaphosa has no idea what to do about it.
Economist Dawie Roodt said that measures like declaring a state of disaster or putting Eskom into business rescue would lead to job losses and other politically damaging eventualities, which, ahead of an election year, are simply not going to happen.
As such, the short-term outlook for load shedding – and the economy – remains “bad to horrible”, he said.